NESCAC Schools

Athletic Recruits
101

I think that depends a lot on the sport and the institutional priorities, which is a factor that gets glossed over sometimes. I’m more familiar with the Ivy League, but I’m guessing NESCAC is similar.

First, the sport matters. As many of you know, wrestling is my background. It is probably the most blue collar sport contested in college. Contrast that with fencing, to use a sport probably on the opposite end of the spectrum, although you could just as easily use golf, tennis, squash or several others. If you are a successful fencer, you probably are in a family that is financially successful and where academics is a big priority.

I picked up several kids from the trailer park to take to wrestling practices or competitions, whose parents hadn’t always graduated HS, or for that matter weren’t always documented. It’s a completely different demographic competing in the sport. Also for many of those kids getting into a NESCAC (or even crappy community college) school can be a life trajectory altering event. I have seen more than one kid who never would have considered college become a successful adult because going to college was the only way they could keep wrestling another 4-5 years.

Point being, if a school wants to even pretend to try to field a competitive team, some sports are going to necessitate lowering the academic standards. Which as I just alluded to can also meet other institutional priorities like getting first generation students and students from underprivileged backgrounds. We are not always but frequently talking about the same kids. I know only 3 NESCAC schools have wrestling, but there is variation among other sports too. That is just the example I am most familiar with, and probably one of the more extreme ones.

The other factor that can make the standards for a particular sport get lowered a bit are institutional priorities. Again falling back on what I know best, Cornell has not finished outside the top 10 teams in D1 wrestling in over a decade and has had numerous national champions. That is because the school has made a decision to prioritize the sport. So they are willing to dip a bit deeper academically to get those athletes that the other Ivies are. I am guessing that Harvard and Yale are willing to dip deeper than Cornell when it comes to recruiting basketball or football players, based on their relative successes in those sports. I don’t know who is prioritizing what, but I’m sure some NESCAC schools are better than others in different sports. If so, there is a good chance that coach is given more flexibility.

This also means that at least at the Ivies, since the average athlete AI has to be within one standard deviation from the student body as a whole, if wrestling or basketball is getting lower AI players, someone has to bring that average back up. So a coach in a sport like fencing or women’s swimming, where there are a lot of really smart kids, knows they have to recruit players substantially above the average AI the school has to meet.

My hunch is that in those higher socioeconomic sports being a competitive player is more akin to a legacy bump. You are getting in over someone else who is equally qualified. But you probably are not getting in over someone who is more qualified. They just don’t have to lower academic standards to field competitive teams in those sports.

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102

If they are given a “slot”, the schools may absolutely admit someone with slightly lower stats. You still need a positive pre-read and meet the admissions standards, but whether you have a slightly lower GPA or a 1500 vs. 1590 is less consequential. If a coach has ~2 slots for a team, they will definitely take the better athlete with good enough stats (but still very good) vs. the one with amazing stats that won’t have as much of an impact on the team.

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103

There are NESCAC schools in northern New England where a 3.5 UW is the Mendoza Line for athletes that are designated difference makers for these schools. NESCACs are definitely taking athletes with a 3.7 over other students with a 3.9, or 4.0 for that matter.

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104

And they all take some non-athletes with 3.7 over other non-athletes with 3.9 and 4.0. It’s all about holistic admissions and filling institutional needs, whether in athletics, or other areas.

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105

I would agree, and have seen this, particularly for a sport like football which has more slots, and more Likely Letters if an Ivy, to give out than other sports that may only have 2-slots.

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106

I don’ think A, B or C Bands equate to Athletic Factor or Coded. I think it just describes the academic band a recruit is put into, similar to the AI score for Ivy athletes. A coach for a particular sport may receive an overall quota for slots and tips which could be further defined by band. For instance the basketball coach may get 2 slots and 3 tips (making the numbers up) that he/she can use across all bands, so he/she can have 2 C band players slotted. Meanwhile the squash coach may have the same 2 slots and 3 tips, but cannot use a slot for any C band recruit and only 1 slot for a B band. My son was an A band, but unless the coaches were not telling us the truth, he was going to get a slot (95%+ chance). I do think many coaches to maximize the quality of their roster will use a slot for lower band players and hope a tip is sufficient for A band recruits. There is a long thread on CC about the bad experience one poster had about “soft” support.

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107

We don’t have data about Nescac schools but we do have the Harvard admissions data, which probably is in the same ballpark. If I remember correctly from @Data10 's excellent posts, the value of being a recruited athlete far outweighed the value of any other hook (IIRC, 80% of recruited athletes would not have gotten in without the athletic bump). AA/NA was a far distant second, Legacy was far behind that, and then LatinX. Not counting Development admits because, well, yeah.

These athletic slots, especially the Athletic Factor ones, are golden tickets, like it or not.

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108

IME Ivy League schools will dip lower academically speaking for athletic recruits than the highly selective NESCACS (so excluding Trinity and Conn College).

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109

I think that’s the conventional wisdom, right? NESCAC = excellent student, very good athlete. Ivy = excellent athlete, very good student.

While many kids could go either way, there are a lot of Ivy athletes who are unrecruitable for NESCAC (probably my kid), and lots of NESCAC athletes who are unrecruitable for Ivies. Similar skill sets, with a subtle yet crucial difference.

Early on my son had a couple NESCAC coaches very interested, but as he developed athletically he started getting interest from Ivy and P5 coaches. Which meant 2 things. 1 - the NESCAC coaches knew they were probably not going to get him anyway so kind of dropped off, and 2 - he knew the academic bar he had to clear dropped, and he studied for the ACT and his classes accordingly. Don’t get me wrong, by most standards he did extremely well. But I don’t know if the Williams coach would have been able to squeeze him in given that he got a C+ and a couple B’s, and refused to study for the ACT since several coaches had already told him his cold score was good enough for the Ivies.

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110

That’s an insightful post on many levels. I know you know this, but some of the athletes I’ve worked with who are at Ivys would never have passed an academic pre-read at Bowdoin, Amherst, or Williams.

I also want to reiterate that people miss the bigger picture when they see such high acceptance rates for athletes…what they don’t see is the many rejections that most athletes experience in the summer before/fall of senior year. It’s brutally competitive for those spots at selective schools and most don’t make the cut…simple math tells us the vast majority of HS athletes don’t play varsity level sports at any college, let alone the highly selectives. I expect the athletic recruit ‘acceptance’ rate of those who do get spots approaches the single digits…the NESCAC and Ivy coaches get thousands of emails each year from athletes interested in playing for them.

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111

I agree with your assessment of NESCAC & Ivy athletes and admissions 100%.

The Ivy my son talked to had a lower threshold than the NESCACs.

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112

That certainly jibes with my overall sense of it having been through it twice, once with an A Band kid and once with a B Band kid (probably middle to lower end of the B Band, but probably not C Band).

One AO I’ve spoken with at a HSLAC said that perhaps the most powerful hook outside of the Jodie Foster at Yale type of scenario is the Native American applicant.

Sports is powerful, much to the chagrin of many people. Also perhaps another thread.

113

There has to be a reason NESCAC schools make a conscious effort to carve out 40% of their campus population for athletes.

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114

It’s definitely competitive. As with LACs in general, there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding. If I had a nickel for every “I can’t believe she didn’t want to play soccer at Gonzaga! D1! Such a great school! Where is she going again?”

People generally tend to think if your kid is good enough to play varsity at the HS level then D3 is open for them. For some HSs that’s true, and it was for ours for the most part. But our varsity and conference sends kids to D1 programs all over the country every year.

Short version: you need to be notably good at your sport. The impact player.

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115

Yes. Lots of reasons but athletes tend to be good time managers, good team players, have leadership skills, and a whole host of other desirable skills like resilience, perseverance, grit, determination, etc. Of course, those skills aren’t limited to only athletes.

Many of these schools track college success of athletes and non-athletes too, similar to how they track performance of TO students, or GPAs of those in Greek Life. Athletes as a group tend to also have similar or better GPAs and grad rates than non-athletes, but not sure I’ve seen actual data on that, which would be nice.

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116

It does get lost a bit that many of these kids, especially the ones who get into Ivies, have a pretty rare combination of skills. I’ve spent a lot of time in the athletic area and know a lot of the athletes in his sport. There are a handful of people in the country who can do what my son does at his level. A vanishingly small number of his athletic contemporaries can handle high level academics while doing so.

I had a conversation a few years ago with someone and I mentioned my son getting let in the back door at his school. It was pointed out to me that in his sport less than 2% of the HS athletes make it to college competition on any level including NAIA and juco. When you couple that with his academics,What he did puts him in a much more exclusive club then getting a 1600 on his SAT.

The athletes are clearing lower academic hurdles. But the overall odds they face are much worse then a kid who can get a 1600 on the SAT.

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117

As with all NCAA Divisions (D1, D3 and D2) there is a broad range of athletic rankings and academics among the schools. Getting recruited to a top tier school with an excellent athletics program is much different than one that is ranked at the bottom and has very high acceptance rates.

I always laugh when someone talks about D1 as if it’s always better than D2 or D3. With hundreds of teams, the bottom rankings of D1 are pretty awful in most sports (as are the bottom rankings of the other divisions).

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118

I had no idea how this worked, and my first go-round wound up focusing on a school where the coach was / is a great person, but not the greatest communicator. So I naively would ask, “She has a near 4.0 in full IB diploma, physics, bio-chem, HL everything, great scores, etc. What is this pre-read business? Why is this not 100%? Why would she use her ED chip on less than 100%?” That kind of attitude.

Finally he has that moment of clarity and explains, yeah, she profiles as a kid who would be a strong consideration for admission on her own. But even those kids are turned down all the time. Being on the list eliminated a lot of the chance she would turned own.

And that’s how I think of it. You should not be rejected if you get a positive pre-read, but it’s known to happen. Outside that, a situation in which a recruit is justifiably ticked off, positive recruiting eliminates/reduces the doubt or chance of a rejection for the really strong applicant. For others, it makes it possible where it was pretty much not going to happen w/o the slot.

119

I got this a lot, even with him going to an Ivy so people have at least heard of his school (although a couple dads remarked “huh, I thought he was good enough for D1”). Not much awareness out here.

I also was asked many times after Ivy canceled sports last year if he was transferring. Lots of people couldn’t wrap their head around him staying enrolled in an Ivy League school instead of transferring to someplace like Northern Colorado or Oklahoma where he would most likely be a starter.

A related comment I get is about his non-athlete little sister at Amherst. People wonder why a smart girl like her is going to a dinky college in Massachusetts instead of the state flagship. I finally just started saying that her brother is at an Ivy and she is smarter than him. So she wanted to go to school more prestigious and harder to get into than his school, and she did.

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120

So true.

Bates, Wesleyan and Williams women’s crew beat lower-end D1 A crews all the time. Not Yale, not Cal, not Texas, not Michigan. U Conn? All day long. Go to the Fall head races. You’ll see it any time you want to.

There’s a recent story about a soccer clinic at Dartmouth and, while I forget the details of how this happened, the Williams women’s soccer team beat the Dartmouth women’s team in a scrimmage. Having faced them a few times, I believe it.

To amplify @Mwfan1921 's point, Williams landed the Washington state Gatorade POTY a few years ago. The west coast is insanely competitive in women’s soccer. As a region, we produce a lot of great female soccer players. CA is insane, but western Washington is also very competitive. So that player winning that award here, by definition, makes her a full fledged D1 recruit. Williams women’s soccer has that kind of pull. They can get that kind of kid. They’ve landed first team All Kingco girls more than once - a level of player that routinely heads to P5. No, they can’t compete week in and week out in the Pac 12. But they are very, very good and can easily run with lower-end D1. Easily.

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